Photoessay #34 - The Wenas Mammoth

Last summer at the Mammoth Dig near Yakima WA...Ian, our neighbor is the young man in the white hat is giving a guided tour of the dig. A long time ago, some mammoths were overcome possibly by a flood and buried on this hillside. One of their bones was discovered by an excavator doing some work for a ranch. He carried the bone around showing it at various taverns for several months until an archaeologist at Central Washington University in Ellensburg heard about it.

A group of university paleontologists, working with the property owner have set up a professional research dig at the site excavating the mammoth remains. Several students from Central Washington University (including Ian) as well as other universities have the experience of working on a dig for credit rather than money.

The dig itself is on a sunny hillside a short distance off a paved road in a area of small ranches outside of Selah about 5 miles from the main highway. Arid open rolling hills with some irrigated areas. The students and paleontologists work several square precise rectangular holes carefully digging one small area at a time. Any bone that they find, they want to carefully preserve. All of the dirt that they take out of a hole is washed through a screen looking for plant remains and any bones of small animals. The residual material is carefully bagged for later analysis in the lab.

Some of the rectangular holes have yielded mammoth bones, some nothing. A found bone is left in its original position and the area around it is carefully excavated. It might take months to get it out. This is the third summer of the dig. Last year, I saw bones sticking out of the dirt that they anticipated not getting out that year. At the end of the dig, they carefully fill in the holes and hope to have enough funding to come back during the next summer.

The dig welcomes visitors for about a month in the summer. For more information: http://www.cwu.edu/~masters/mammoth.html
The rancher who lives just over the hill has been very cooperative with the researchers. His family has designed an illustrated t-shirt depicting their ideas what the mammoths might have looked like (see below). The t-shrts were being sold from a bench to raise money to cover the extra insurance and water costs. We bought one. The surrounding community supports the Wenas Mammomth project. Ian told us that if anybody unauthorized or suspicious is poking around the dig, they are likely to surprised by a rancher with a shotgun. Nobody should mess with THEIR mammoth!

Ian told us last summer that there was one find, that caused a lot of consternation among the dig's professional staff. Signs of humans. At that point it becomes archaeological or anthropological which makes the whole dig a lot more complicated. Native remains. The staff did not want to get into that, they just wanted their mammoth.

From the Central Washington site:

At present, there is only one unambiguous human artifact, a single chipped stone flake, that was found near the mammoth vertebrae and bison (?) bones. However, it is located slightly above these bones, and we are in the process of trying to determine its relationship to the bones. With this 2006 flake find, the project is technically both paleontology (focused on the fossil record) and archaeology (focused on the human past).